University of South Carolina Libraries
on the Horseshoe The skinny on the many legends surrounding use BY KEVIN FELLNER THE GAMECOCK They say he walks the university’s un derground service tunnels, or “cata combs” as they’re known. He has been described as having a grotesque shape and dresses in silver clothes. And of course there’s always that third eye that's just as distinguishing. The story of the Third Eye Man grew out of a reported sighting outside Longstreet Theatre with an account published in The Gamecock in November of 1949. The commotion about the story died down only days after a reporter wrote about the alleged “Sewer Man. ” But he returned to head lines in April of 1950 when a USCPD officer found gutted chickens spread around the side of Longstreet one night and a brief glimpse in his flashlight’s path of a man who he said had a third eye in the middle of his face. It wasn’t a big eye, he said, but he was sure it was an eye. “I sort of wish he would make a comeback,” said Jona Briggs of Ghosts and Legends of Columbia said, adding that the legend of the Third Eye Man was a popular story among students in the late 1960s and again in the late ’80s and early ’90s. The story comes from some inflated police re ports over the years that turned into ghost stories. “Most of the stories have come from newspaper stories over the years and from the ghost walks downtown,” said USCPD Director Ernie Ellis, who knows of several of the university’s mythical sto-_ ries. Briggs, who leads the downtown ghost walks and says she doesn’t believe in ghosts, said many of USC’s ghost stories are historically based but pur posely dramatized for their scary effect on visitors. “They’re based on facts,” Briggs said. “But when we get to the stories, we embroider them to make them real ghost stories.” She said different ghost walk guides tell the story with different twists. According to a 1998 article by graduate English student Marc Minsker, students’ fascination with the Third Eye Man grew in the 1960s when frater nities sent pledges to the catacombs to confront the silver-suited beast. After these Third-Eye-Man hunts became regular occurrences, the catacombs were closed and are to this day only used for main tenance purposes. Discussion about the underground figure is rare these days. Briggs said even local historians have given up searching for him. “They say that he has just vanished off campus and that he was a real person,” she said. Second-year mathematics student James Scurry said he had never heard of the Third Eye Man but would be watching out for him as a safety precau tion. “I live right over there at Woodrow, and that’s pretty close,” he said. “He might come over and try and grab me or something. ” Scurry said he believes in ghosts and that he could believe there are some haunting USC’s cam pus. Third-year chemistry student Michael Bechtold said the same. ‘Tm going to try to look for him,” he said. “Three eyed people, you don’t see them that often.” Briggs said she expects the search for the Third Eye Man would return as a campus competition in the coming years. “I was hoping that one Halloween some fraterni ty brothers would get the urge and recreate the sto ry of the Third Eye Man in their own way,” she said. Horse of a story_ Phantom horsemen are everywhere — even USC BY ALEXIS STRATTON THE (JAMEGOCK Washington Irving’s story “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” immortalized the unforgettable image of the headless horseman. While a number of films, cartoons and story books have been generated from this fascinating fiction, Columbia’s own phantom horseman — orig inating from events many believe to be true — is less well-documented. This ghost story, however, is no less intriguing. Nancy Rogers reports on the event her 1983 book “South Carolina Ghosts: From the Coast to the Mountains.” Rogers wrote that one night in the spring of 1914, as “ominous signs of war in Europe” were mount ing, Raymond MacDonald, a Civil War veteran, saw “a sharply etched, ghostly figure of a horseman” above the large oak trees at the comer of Blanding and Bull streets. Rogers writes that MacDonald identified the details of the horse and rider, from the apparition’s “heroic size” to its “flowing tail.” Supposedly, others in the area that night saw the phantom as well. T,he next day a number of people gathered around the site to view the apparition that every one was talking about. The phantom appeared again, Rogers writes, and witnesses began to spec ulate on its origins. Some believed the white horseman to be one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, sent to fore tell the end of the world. Others, such as MacDonald, believed it to be the ghost of General Wade Hampton, who was visiting Columbia to warn of the impending world war. The ghost was never seen again. Sightings of so-called Angel Horses are “often as sociated with wars,” writes Rogers. Rogers notes at least 13 different occasions in which similar ap pearances occurred, from an incident in which St. James appeared during a conflict between the Spaniards and Moors to one involving the ghost of George Washington at Little Round Top during the battle of Gettysburg. Also mentioned are appearances by ghostly horsemen to Britons, Germans, Russians, Frenchmen and Irishmen. Included among the specters are: St. George, the patron saint of England; General Skobeleff, a Russian national hero; and Joan of Arc, a French military leader. The majority of the horsemen were seen atop white horses. The Horseshoe’s most visible building reeks of rumors BY JON TURNER THE HAMKCOCK Museum director Lynn Robertson has a thing or two to say about rumors that the McKissick Museum is haunt “That’s very funny,” she said. “That’s always been the big rumor, and everybody always says that it’s haunted by J. Rion (McKissick) because, well, in the basement there’s a sump pump, and sev eral mechanical rooms, and they produce all sorts of clinking and clanking and mechanical noises, and it’s very dark and gloomy down in the base ment.” When McKissick became accredited, Robertson said, staffers were staying late to work. A mannequin was left from an exhibit, and some students dressed it up. It was a little spooky, Robertson said. “I remember about 11 one night, riding the old elevator down to the dark basement and the door — you had to manu ally open it, and I was opening it up and there was the mannequin, who they named Delta Dawn, for an old song.” “Delta Dawn,” a 1973 hit by Helen Reddy, could is a little spooky in itself: “Delta Dawn, what’s that flower you have on/Could it be a faded rose from days gone by/And did I hear you say he was a-meet ing you here today/To take you to his mansion in the sky.” Robertson the students who worked there had fun carrying Delta Dawn around all over the museum. “Go into the bathroom, and there she’d be,” she said. Rita Czako, a first-year biology student, said McKissick was converted to a haunted house for Halloween when she was in elementary school. “It really was creepy. They’d use the elevator, and put up fake spider webs and they had this guy who was missing parts of his body from all over, and in stead of hands, he had empty...” she trailed off, “Of course they also had normal spaghetti and peeled grapes for guts and stuff. ” Czako also worked at a McKissick Museum day camp as a freshman and sophomore in high school. “If I believed in ghosts, I’d say the McKissick Museum is definitely haunted,” she said. “It’s so creepy, and I can’t stand that elevator — it’s not that I : : ■■ - I don’t like being underground. The sound is weird. It dies.” McKissick was buried in front of the Caroliniana Library on the Horseshoe in 1944, but the ghost story, Robertson concluded, was a myth. “It’s just because the building is really old, and it creaks and groans at night,” she said. “It’s nice to think that J. Rion is still with us.” The McKissick museum can be kind of an eerie, old quiet building, many have said. It has a striking presence right at the end of the Horseshoe, and it seems to some like a perfect haunt ed house. It stands at the site of the old president’s house, built in 1807, according to USC’s records. The muse um itself, built in 1940, is a grand structure, compared to the rest of the Horseshoe architecture, based on a similar structure at Davidson College in North Carolina. It was originally known simply as the University Library, but was changed to the McKissick Library after McKissick, then USC’s president, died in office in 1944. The McKissick Library wasn’t changed to a mu- / seum until the mid’70s. Robertson remembers the change. “President Patterson appointed a committee of university faculty and staff to decide what to do with the building. They unanimously agreed that they thought the best use of the McKissick was a muse um and archives,” she said. “The collection put together by the university be fore the McKissick was very strong in terms of what we call Southern Material Culture,” she said, “We asked ourselves, ‘What could we contribute that no body else was doing?” Consequently, the museum decided to focus on that area it was already strong in: traditional quilts and Charleston seagrass baskets and eventually be came a major center for folk art education and re search. “We had a visit a couple years ago by the Catawba potters,” Robertson said, “They wanted to copy some of the older traditional forms.” / The museum received a grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Service of about $250,000. “We’re hoping in about two years to have a com prehensive Web site about southern art and culture,” Robertson said mHlS(ory ins tales of girls chastity f The Maxcy monument, located in the cen ter of the Horseshoe, has witnessed al most two centuries of history. The structure, designed by Robert Mills and con structed in honor of former South Carolina College President Jonathan Maxcy, withstood the firestorm of Union Gen. William Sherman’s 1865 march through Columbia, witnessed the eventual integra tion of the campus during the 1950s and remained stationary through the 100-mph winds of Hurricane Hugo’s 1989 drive through the state. Countless hot summer suns have glared off of its prominent brass ball. And even as ithas continued to stand prominently while 300-foot buildings have risen to dominate the background, there is a lighter side to this monument’s 177-year history. Nobody is sure where the myth came from, but sometime around the late 1930s and 1940s a rumor began that if a female virgin were to walk by the mon ument, the brass ball sitting on top would spin. And while the ball has since been bolted to the iron cradle in which it sits, the real significance of the rumor has been in the role it has played in the tradition of the university. The recorded evidence of the monument’s spin ning ball is faint at best. The only on-campus record of any myth about the monument is in the Feb. 19, 1954, edition of The Gamecock. There, in the half-century-old newspaper’s edito rial section, then managing editor Bill Leggitt wrote a piece condemning a prank where somebody had stolen the brass ball from the monument. In his col limn, Leggitt referred to the myth. “Many of us thought at first that some diligent student, firmly believing in the virtue of the Carolina coed, had taken the ball to see why it never moved,” he said. While Leggitt’s piece was mostly meant to de nounce whoever had stolen the ball, it was his state ment referring to the rumor that provided a solid base for the myth to take root in USC tradition, USC archivist Elizabeth West said. “The furthest I’ve ever seen it referenced was about the ‘40s, ‘50s. And in writing, it pretty much goes back to that Gamecock article,” West said. USC alumnus Bill Thomas recalls the role the myth played when he attended USC in the early 1950s. “It has a certain action when a certain girl walks past it... I guess it just came down to we didn’t have much to talk about back then. But its good for a col lege experience; it makes your tradition that much more fun,” he said. “At any college campus there are $ set traditions, and then there are colorful ones on the side that kind of spring out of a need to break bore dom.” The ultimate test for the myth has been time. Similar to the way Thomas recounted the myth af ter graduating and leaving USC in 1952,1973 graduate David Salter described his version of it. “I remember that if a virgin were to walk by the monument, the ball on top would spin. Now it would have to be a female virgin, and I guess the whole point was that the ball never spun, so no one on cam pus was a virgin,” he said. “The girls didn’t like it much, but people need some type of tradition to tie together the generations, and this served to do just that.” '■